Straight from the Horror
fest film festival which showed eight previously
unreleased films in three days we have the first film
from film director Mike Mendez in six years, ‘Grave
Dancers’. His first film is the now semi cult
classic ‘The Convent’ which I have yet to see, but will
make it point to check it out after seeing ‘Grave
Dancers’ since this turned out to be a much better than
the average horror movie.

First things first, I
don’t like sitting around being scared. It’s just
not something that does it for me. I’m playing
Doom 3 on my PC a year or so ago whenever it was
released and after a couple levels it became obvious to
me that playing a video game that scares me just isn’t
my idea of a good time. But also, I’m not very
easy to scare because I can generally see what’s
happening a mile away so I can watch most horror movies
without any problem. As a point of reference, the
last time I can actually remember being scared watching
a movie would be the last scene of Brian DePalma’s
‘Carrie’ and the whole enchilada of John Carpenter’s
‘The Thing’. I honestly can’t think of a film that
has created such a sense of brooding, impending doom as
‘The Thing’ and as such, it is one of my favorite films
of all time. Oh, and when Samara walked through
the TV near the end of the American remake of ‘The Ring’
freaked me out as well, though I didn’t care for the
movie as a whole.

‘Grave Dancers’ didn’t
actually scare me but it did dish out a couple of really
good jolts. Prison Break’s Dominic Purcell is
Harris McKay, an up and coming young lawyer attending
the funeral of an old classmate with his wife Allison
(Claire Kramer), ex girlfriend Kira (Josie Maran) and
all around screw-up buddy Sid (Marcus

Thomas). Actually
Sid didn’t make it to the funeral, but showed up for the
wake and it’s free food, and managed to convince his
friends to head down to the graveyard and have one last
drink with their dead buddy. Wifey Allison bowed
out at the wake since she hates the old girlfriend
anyway. So our heroes are drinking it up in the
cemetery when Sid finds a gold emblem sealed greeting
card on the tombstone. He cracks it open, which is
bad because in the films opening scene we saw something
really awful happen to a young woman who was holding
that exact same card. The card has some cryptic
poetry which ends with comments advising the reader to
dance on the grave or something. See, this is why
I could never be in a horror flick. First, I would
not be drinking, at night, in a cemetery.
Secondly, I ain’t dancing, no matter what time of day,
on no grave. But that’s just me.

Our heroes dance and then
bad things start to happen as our grave dancers are
mercilessly haunted by the occupants of the graves they
danced on. As time goes on, it seems the ghouls
want more than haunting, they want blood. Wife
Alison is thinking that this is some total B.S. since
she was at home sleeping while these lunatics were grave
dancing, but for better or worse they say. They
call in a couple of paranormal investigators from the
school (Tcheky Karyo and Meghan Perry) who tells them
they are pretty much f’d since the ghoulies are only
getting stronger and won’t stop until everybody’s
dead. It also didn’t help that these nuts were
dancing in the section of the cemetery where the Abby
Normal folks were buried. The only choice they
have is just try to survive until the sun rises after
the full moon, or some nonsense similar to that, and the
curse will be broken. So it becomes a race to
survive until sunrise. Will our grave dancers make
it? Stay tuned…

Mendez definitely has an
eye for horror and sets up the pacing for some serious
shocks that are sprinkled throughout the film, though I
personally felt it could have used more. I also
felt the atmosphere wasn’t quite right for a horror film
as everything seemed a bit too bright and sunny.
With a more creative use of lighting ‘Grave Dancers’
would have had a far more eerie feel to it. I did
like the characters and the acting in the film as the
characters behaved pretty much in a way I think people
should behave given this completely unreal
situation. Grave dancing aside, of course, which
is just plain silly.

Near the end of ‘Grave
Dancers’ it completely goes over-the-top with the low
bud CGI effects and a completely ridiculous big ghoul
head Hummer chase scene our heroes find themselves in,
and as a result, it doesn’t do the film any
justice. But as far as the story arc goes, it
seemed that Mendez, with the whole ‘letter you shouldn’t
open’ premise was attempting make a Japanese style
horror film with an American slant, and from that
standpoint ‘Grave Dancers’ was hit and miss.
Though better than most of the tired American remakes of
the genre, it doesn’t quite measure up to the best
that’s coming in from across the Pacific.
Nonetheless, after witnessing such sour fare as ‘When a
Stranger Calls’ and ‘Silent Hill’, Grave Dancers comes
up smelling like roses, or at least tainted ones.
Maybe not a must-see, bet definitely worth seeing.